5 Promotions Your Gym Should Run This Spring
Now that it’s a new season, it’s time for new gym promotions. Here are five ideas that focus on spring while keeping the challenges of the pandemic in mind.
1. Offer Current/Previous Members an Upgrade
We’ve said it before—one of the best ways to run a successful gym is to put a significant amount of effort on member retention instead of always going after new members.
Encourage current members to stay by offering a bonus or upgrade like gym merchandise, a free personal training session or a higher tier membership for a month. You’ll help keep them satisfied with your thank-you bonus and may even entice them to add on to their current membership.
Also, this is an especially good time to reach out to those people who recently left your gym because of the pandemic and may be thinking about coming back. Consider encouraging them to return by offering a discount, which will be helpful for those who had financial difficulty this past year.
2. Lose the Pandemic Weight Gain
Pandemic weight gain was real, with people staying home, being thrown off their routine and engaging in unhealthy habits like emotional/stress eating. Doctors were seeing patients who on average gained three to 15 pounds due to the pandemic, and a study noted that about 22 percent of adults had gained weight throughout the pandemic.
Just as the gain was a real thing, keep things real with your members and prospective members in your marketing. Address the issue head-on with promotions that target this issue. You could market with catchy phrases like “Beat the Quarantine 15” and/or offer programs with a specific time frame and plan to help them counteract the weight they gained.
3. Offer Online Fitness Offerings as a Bonus for Gym Membership
Because of the way the pandemic shifted workouts to homes, going forward people are going to expect the fitness industry to continue offering online content they can work out to from anywhere. You can turn this into a promotion by adding online offerings, such as classes or personal training sessions, to an in-person gym membership. Members will get the best of both worlds.
4. Lose Weight by Summer Programs
Lean on the tried-and-true promotion based on the ongoing desire to lose weight by the summer. Springtime is the perfect time to catch an audience that’s starting to think about summer plans and may have the motivation to start preparing. Put in their mind that realistic weight loss goals mean they should start a program now to lose a significant amount of weight by summer.
Create specific or customized plans to help people reach a certain amount of weight within a specific time frame. For example, you could run a program to lose 10 pounds in five weeks or customized programs to help members reach their specific weight loss goals.
5. Highlight Benefits of the Gym
Now is the time to run promotions that get people back into the gym after the pandemic. To do this, focus your promotions on the specific benefits of an in-person gym experience over an at-home workout. Here are some ideas:
- A bring-a-friend or buy-one-get-one promotion to focus on the social aspect of the gym
- An upgrade of sessions that show people how to use your gym’s equipment, which is a feature they can’t match at home
- A free bonus like a personal training session, smoothie, child care session or something else that shows perks of going to your specific gym in person
When you try a promotion this spring, you can track how well it does with gym management software. Let us know which promotions work best for your gym!
